I propose to do away with the oxygen masks in the cabin (hey, how often are they needed anyway?) and put loaded but uncocked 9mm Brownings in those lockers. When somebody starts shooting, the lockers open (either manually by flight crew action, or automatically by the decompression of the hull or by a gunshot audio detector) and 200 armed people can take care of the problem.

That will put an end to those terrorists.

Each aircraft will have 10-20 seats that do not have a gun, but keep the oxygen mask. It costs $50 to get such a seat and you need to sign a declaration that the airline is not responsible for you being shot after the guns get released.

Jeroen

Sounds good to me! The airlines will no doubt jump on this opportunity to make money, but will also charge for access to your overhead firearm. Ammo also costs extra, and even more if you don't pre-buy your stash. If you wait til the shooting starts, ammo becomes VERY expensive, as does access to your 9mm. And they could also sell access to body armor. If you want rifle-proof ceramic armor chest plates like the military uses, that costs extra too.

Sounds like time for someone to write some patents!!

-------I wonder how many airline pilots became trained to carry firearms? I believe the airlines were required to allow them to do this if they wanted to. Not sure I would want to step out of the cockpit to engage in a gun fight in the passenger compartment, though.

I suspect that pilots with military backgrounds (especially with combat experience) would look at this specific issue much differently than pilots without military training.

Bad timing, Phil. I am currently back in the Netherlands, trying to deflate a house inventory to fit into one twenty feet sea container. Cold, dark, and increasingly uncomfortable in the house. But very much looking forward to the actual move with my family.

This Sunday evening we touch down at KMIA. That will be the start of something quite different!

The house has been gzipped into the TEU and we've waved it out of the street yesterday afternoon. Now the task of keeping alive for one more day and night in an empty house before we board the plane for Miami.

Welcome to the USA! I'm just a few hours away in Tampa, so once you are all settled in, let me know and we will drive down for drinks and dinner. North Miami Beach is a pretty place to hang out and relax.

The latest mass shooting in the US is provoking much attention from the major media, including the TV news channels. I don't see any signs yet that the US voters intend to follow the UK and Australia into requiring the government to purchase or confiscate the approximately 300 million firearms citizens now own. With recent Supreme Court rulings establishing firearms ownership as a Constitutional right in some senses, it would seemingly be hard to change things much. A few states make it very hard to own or carry firearms, though (NY, Massachusetts, and a few others).

There is an interesting set of data, downloadable into a spreadsheet, published by the UK Guardian newspaper today:

I became interested in statistical data analysis, etc, during grad school, continuing during my career in R&D. Thus, I couldn't resist doing some informal analysis of these firearms ownership rates vs homicide rates data around the countries of the world.

At first glance, I don't see much if any statistically significant relationship between firearms ownership and firearms homicide rates. I need to work with the data more, though, since some countries have zero or near-zero civilian firearms ownership rates, and this makes some data analyses more complex. It is certainly very striking how unusual the US is in terms of firearms ownership rate (88.8 firearms per 100 people vs an average of about 30).

If you're interested in such data, in light of current events, I suggest you plot "Firearms owned per 100 people" vs "Firearm Homicide Rate per 100K population" in Excel or whatever. It's interesting to plot various combinations on a linear-linear as well as a semi-log plot.

Of course crimes, including homicide, are not mere statistics, but are tragic beyond measure in so many senses.